Copyright 1913, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

CHAPTER 24

STUDY OF POLYGAMY

POLYGAMY traverses the customs and ideals of all European peoples for at least twenty-five centuries. It is associated in the public mind with sensuous Orientalism, or with that transplanted Orientalism which rears its defiant head in America. It shocks the moral sense of millions. It has been denounced as a relic of barbarism, as legalized sensuality, as the enslavement of a sex. Yet it keeps on its clandestine way, defying or evading law and public sentiment, celebrating its forbidden banns under the very noses of judges and in the shadow of orthodox churches. Probably there are more plural wives in the Mormon kingdom today than at any previous time in its history.

A doctrine which has proved immune to society's cursing is at least worthy of society's study. That study must take no account of prejudice, habit, or sentiment. Good and bad are terms used to distinguish that which helps from that which hinders the progress of the human race. All codes, all customs must be tried at last by this standard; and polygamy is no exception. If it can show itself helpful to mankind, polygamy will make its way despite laws and anathemas. And unless an unprejudiced examination shows that polygamy tends to lower the standards and retard the progress of humanity, any objection to it is open to the suspicion of ignorance or prejudice, and any effort to suppress it will be branded as religious persecution.

Mormon apologists for polygamy claim for it four points of superiority over monogamy. These are:

1. That polygamy tends to a more rapid increase of population.
2. That polygamy gives the only chance of wifehood and honorable motherhood to millions of women.
3. That polygamy prevents prostitution.
4. That polygamy secures better safeguards for mother and child during pregnancy and the nursing period.

The claim that polygamy tends to a more rapid increase of population than monogamy is disproved by the most casual acquaintance with history. Without exception, countries which have shown a great and steady growth of population for long periods are monogamous countries. Monogamous Europe has distanced North Africa and western Asia. Monogamous China is more populous and more stable in its numbers than partially polygamous India. Monogamous Japan -- the exceptions to monogamy in the Island Empire are hardly worth mentioning -- has been increasing in numbers while polygamous Turkey and Persia have declined. These differences cannot be laid to the superior civilization of countries where population is mounting, and if they could, the association of a higher type of civilization with monogamous marriage would be sufficient.

Only once in the world's history has there been a great and rapid increase of polygamous peoples, as compared to those practising monogamy. This was when the Saracens came out of their deserts to conquer and people the world. Even in this case, the shifting balance was due to conquest, rather than to growth. The women of Syria, Egypt, and northern Africa were swept by hundreds of thousands into the harems of the conquerors, and their children were accounted Arabs and Moslems. In this case, polygamy combined with successful war to change the blood, language, and religion of vast regions. It exalted Islam, and depressed Christendom. But there is nothing to show that it added a single member to the total population of the world.

Turning from the study of rations to that of individual cases, it is easy to see the fallacy in this first of Mormon claims for plural marriage. The man of many wives has more children than the man of one wife. But as a shrewd observer noted long ago, the increase of population depends on mothers; and the average plural wife bears fewer children than her monogamous sister. Brigham Young was a man of amazing vigour. His wives were fine examples of physical womanhood. A biography authorized by his eldest son and by several of his widows credits him with twenty-five wives. The list is incomplete; but it will do for the purpose of this inquiry. Eleven of those twenty-five women were childless. Six of them bore one child each. One had two children, one had three, and the remaining six had four or more children apiece. All told, the twenty-five wives had only forty-four children. In a simple, healthy society, where child-bearing was reckoned the first of duties, is it thinkable that as many wives, each with a separate husband, would have borne so few children?

Similar households records are familiar to every student of Eastern history.

Mohammed had eleven wives, and his line is extinct. Rameses Second was perhaps the most married monarch of ancient times. The census of his palace is not very authentic, but it seems certain that he had more wives than children. Theoretically, the procreative powers of a healthy man seem almost limitless; practically, masculine fertility is not very remarkable. Here and there is a shining exception. Augustus the Strong had 365 children by no one knows how many mistresses. John D. Lee, whom we shall meet again at Mountain Meadows, had sixty-four children by eighteen wives, and fifty-four of his offspring were living at the time of his execution. Joseph F. Smith, present head of the church, is more economical of potential motherhood than almost any other polygamist on record; he has forty-three children by six wives. But in practically every case, it may be predicted that the woman who becomes a plural wife will bear fewer children than she would bear in monogamy.

The claim that polygamy is necessary to give every woman her undoubted right to honorable motherhood might be urged with some show of reason in England or Scandinavia. Put forward in America, it is laughable. The census of 1910 showed 2,692,288 more males than females in the population of the United States -- and 20,375 more males than females in Utah, the heart of the Mormon empire. In the nation at large, there are 106 males to every hundred females. In Utah, there were 111.5 males to every hundred females. If such a census indicates any change in our present form of marriage, that change points to polyandry, rather than to polygamy.

It has been said that the excess of males in this country is due to immigration, and also that there is no such excess among persons of marriageable age. The first of these statements is only half true; the second is not true at all. Detailed figures from the census of 1910 are not available at this writing; but in 1900, among the native whites of native parents in the United States, there were 322,579 more men than women between the ages of 20 and 45 years.

In point of fact, in all countries occupied by white men, there is a considerable excess of male children at birth. In England, 104.5 boys are born to every 100 girls. In France, the proportion is 105.5 to 100; in Germany, about 106 to 100; and in Roumania, it rises to 109 to 100. In all countries, to be sure, the death-rate of males is higher than that of females; and this fact, coupled with war, colonization, and emigration, has left a very slight excess of females over males in most European countries. If this excess became very marked, polygamy might perhaps be adopted as a temporary expedient, as seems to have been the case in Germany following the Thirty Years' War. But the present disparity between the sexes is too slight to warrant any proposal of change in marriage customs. It would cost less money and effort, to put the matter on no more debatable ground, to provide for an assisted emigration of women to lands where men are in the majority.

The claim that polygamy prevents prostitution is a typical case of reasoning from isolated facts. There was no prostitution in Utah before the "Winter Mormon" and the Gentile traveller came to the Happy Valley; and Utah was polygamous. Neither was there any prostitution in the Boer republics until the countrymen of Cecil Rhodes introduced it, along with other evidences of progress; and the Boers were and are monogamous. A simple, undifferentiated society where there is little luxury and little want, and where every one in the neighborhood knows every one else, seldom or never produces or supports any considerable extent of prostitution. Such societies often have a high percentage of illegitimate births, but they are free from commercialized vice. It should be added that the polygamous elders of Utah thought it necessary to permit the introduction of prostitution as a means of safeguarding their multiplied households from invading Gentiles.

Finally we come to the claim that polygamy guards the rights and person of the pregnant and nursing mother, and thus produces a better offspring than can be expected of monogamy. Whatever advantages there may be in abstinence from conjugal relations during this period undoubtedly were secured to three generations of Mormon children born in polygamy. But it is not yet apparent that children thus "safeguarded" before their birth outstrip in either health or intelligence the offspring of monogamous marriages. Besides, the same rule of abstinence has been enforced among countless peoples where polygamy did not prevail; and can be secured anywhere by education, if the theory back of the rule is provably sound. In spite of certain eloquent reformers and zealous missionaries, few men are satyrs.

At the risk of interrupting the logical order of this discussion, we would point out here that monogamy has at least one valuable advantage. It gives a wife the undivided care of her husband when she needs it most. The first experience in maternity is a beautiful, a sacred, but usually an anxious time for a woman. The nervous disturbances of her state are considerable; and are magnified by the brooding mind of the expectant mother. Then, if ever, she needs the loving attention of a stronger and untroubled mate. We believe there are few men of experience who will say that their care would have been sufficient if divided among a dozen or more wives.

The superior virtues claimed for polygamy by its loudest champions do not exist. Even this brief and we believe unbiassed examination has sufficed to dispose of them all. But the zealot is not always the wisest advocate; and polygamy may have virtues which Mormon missionaries have failed to appreciate. Casting about for such overlooked blessings, we may ask whether polygamy would not be a help to natural selection, or to that substitute for natural selection known as eugenics.

Eugenics, as its foremost advocate has pointed out, proceeds by two methods, the negative and the positive. Negative eugenics seeks merely to prevent the marriage of the unfit. There is no evidence to show that the number of men unfit to be fathers is greater than the number of women unfit to be mothers; though the pauses of unfitness may differ in the two sexes. Unless it can be shown that men show a far higher percentage of unfitness for parenthood than women, there is nothing in the theory of negative eugenics to suggest a change in the present marriage customs.

Positive eugenics seeks to encourage marriage and child-bearing among the fit. If the breeding and rearing of a child were as simple a matter as the breeding and rearing of a colt, polygamy would score at once.

But it is not so simple. How would the proper sires of the next generation be selected? Who would compel the marriageable hoi polloi who showed no deterring taint to stand back and give the supermen supreme charge of propagation? The moment one descends from theory to practice, one perceives the absurdity of expecting to organize any system of polygamy as a means of improving the human race.

One thing somewhat allied to improving the race polygamy can do and has done. It is a potent aid to assimilating a whole population to the ideals, language, and in part to the race of the master caste. The Arab conquest already cited is a case in point; and the settlement of Utah is another. A little clique of American sires dominated the entire mass of immigrants; and today, the names of those men are the names of the master clans of Utah.

But is this power of polygamy one which society needs in the ordinary and usual course of events; the common course for which laws and customs are shaped? Manifestly not. The public school is far cheaper and less disruptive of present ideals than polygamy; but the public school has done marvels in assimilating immigrants. We may say with little fear of contradiction that no country should tolerate the coming of immigrants who need to be crossed with the native stock to make good citizens. As for the help of polygamy in assimilating a conquered people, modern sociology does not look with much favor on violent conquests, or on crosses between sharply divergent races. The one case where polygamy was used on a large scale in this way brought a higher people down to the standards of a lower. Arab civilization in Syria and North Africa today is lower than the Byzantine civilization of more than twelve centuries ago.

After so earnest and vain a search for good things to say about polygamy, it is surely fair to set forth a few criticisms. This is a terribly easy thing to do.

Polygamy tends to subordinate one sex to another. This has been its effect in all lands where it has endured for any considerable length of time -- as time is counted in history; and this will be its effect wherever it comes. Equality between the sexes is impossible when one man is deemed a sufficient mate for six, ten, or thirty women. Mormon polygamy had the splendid advantage of a clean start among American people, where respect for women is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the world; yet even among the Mormons, the tendency of the system to exalt one sex and depress the other was plain. Heber C. Kimball used often to refer to his wives as his "cows." Horace Greeley states that he never heard a Mormon church dignitary quote the opinion of his wife on any subject. The sermons in the Journal of Discourses are filled with scolding advice to women to modify their love for ornament, to busy themselves in domestic industries, to be more economical in the household. It seemed as if any man were thought qualified to lecture any woman on any subject.

As polygamy depresses the standing of women, so does it tend to prevent cordial companionship and deep affection between the sexes. An incident which occurred when Mormon polygamy was at its best will illustrate this better than any amount of argument. A family party was given at the country-place of an Apostle who shall be called Jones. There was present at this party another elder who may be known as Smith, who seemed to be enjoying himself as much as any one there. During general conversation, the fact was casually mentioned that one of Elder Smith's wives had died the day before, and was to be buried the next day. A monogamous Mormon present in the company flamed up in wrath at Smith's presence under such circumstances; but Mrs. Jones interposed. "Never mind," she said with sarcasm that quite passed over the head of the offending elder. "When a man has so many wives, he could not be expected to let the death of one of them distract his attention from anything so important as a party!"

It is needless to dwell at length on further objections to polygamy, but a few may be cited in passing. It tends to cause too early marriage, especially of girls. Heber C. Kimball, gave it as his august decision that girls should be married at the age of fourteen and boys at least by the time they were fifteen years old.

Polygamy tends to the production of strong family clans, whose ambitions and quarrels are dangerous to the state. It tends to give an undue proportion of the women of a community in marriage to elderly men, and to men whose abilities are chiefly of a financial order. Plural marriage is an expensive luxury for any civilized husband; and men who have had time to accumulate a store of this world's goods, or who have a money-making disposition, will be much more likely to acquire a well-filled harem than the gallant youngsters whose adventurous idealism might be so much more valuable to the world.

In this case, at least, the verdict of science coincides with the verdict of instinct. Polygamy is exactly what it was named in a political catch-phrase fifty years ago. It is a relic of barbarism, or, at least, of a lower order of civilization. In the Mormon kingdom, polygamy is linked with a yet more vicious and barbaric thing, the despotic rule of a political priesthood. If a plural marriage were good in itself, -- which it is not -- its alliance with theocracy would condemn it.

The harem is no more foreign to American ideals of home than a prophet in politics is to American ideals of liberty.